A high school football player recently had the misfortune of carrying something truly unexpected in his helmet: a two-foot-long potentially deadly venomous snake. The strange incident occurred last week at Maumelle High School in Arkansas. The male student-athlete had been practicing on the field for at least an hour when he and his coach made the discovery. Animal services officials thankfully removed the snake without incident. Snake helmet According to the Associated Press, the player did feel some “unusual movement” in his helmet when he first put it on, but he thought little of it at first. Eventually, though, the sensation got so bothersome that he brought over the gear to his assistant couch to be examined. And that’s when they spotted a snake poking its head through the helmet’s padding. The cottonmouth snake in the helmet. ©Maumelle Animal Services/Cole Bierbaum Maumelle Animal Services officials were called to the high school to extract the snake, though it didn’t cooperate easily. Ultimately, they had to literally flush the slithery reptile out by dunking the helmet in water.
According to The Athletic, the players and coach initially thought the snake was a copperhead, a type of venomous pit viper widely found throughout the central and eastern U.S. But officials determined that it was actually a young adult cottonmouth, another commonly encountered kind of viper in the region. They also noted that the fairly big snake had likely eaten recently and may have just been looking for a secluded area to hunker down after its hard-earned meal.
